Detail view of Movies Page Summary: In Chicago, in February, 1929, federal agent Mulligan sets up a raid on a speakeasy run by notorious bootlegger “Spats” Colombo, based on information provided by small-time gangster “Toothpick” Charlie. As Mulligan inspects the lively speakeasy, two members of the band, saxophonist Joe and bass player Jerry eagerly discuss plans for their salary from their first job in four months. The longtime friends begin arguing about how to spend their salary until Jerry notices Mulligan’s badge and they make a hasty exit as the raid begins, avoiding the police roundup. Putting up their coats as collateral, they place a bet with their bookie, and promptly lose both the bet and their coats. Desperate, Joe and Jerry visit the musicians’ agency building hoping to line up another job. At Sid Poliakoff’s agency, receptionist Nellie Weinmeier, incensed over being stood up by Joe a few nights earlier, reveals there is an opening for a bass and sax with a band in an all-expenses paid trip to Florida. Joe and Jerry eagerly question Sid, only to learn that the positions are in an all-girl band.

Sid tells them of a job at a college dance in Urbana and Joe accepts, then charms Nellie into loaning them her car for the Urbana gig. Retrieving the car at a garage owned by Toothpick Charlie, Joe and Jerry unintentionally witness Spats and his men shoot Charlie and his men to death for informing on the speakeasy. Although the musicians are spotted by Spats, he is distracted by Charlie, who revives long enough to allow Joe and Jerry to flee. After they evade the gangsters, Jerry suggests they call the police, but Joe reminds him they will not be safe from Spats in any part of Chicago in spite of the police. Joe then telephones Sid and, using a high falsetto voice, accepts the job with the all-girl band. That evening at the train station, Joe and Jerry, uncomfortably disguised as women, check in with band leader Sweet Sue and manager Beinstock as the newest members of the Society Syncopators, Joe as Josephine and Jerry as Daphne.

Once on board the train, Joe fears that Jerry’s enthusiasm at finding himself among so many women will expose them and warns his friend to behave “like a girl,” but in the process, musses Jerry’s outfit. Retreating to the ladies’ room for repairs, the men come upon stunning singer and ukulele player Sugar Kane Kowalczyk drinking bourbon from a flask. Sugar pleads with them not to report her to Sue, who has threatened to fire her if she is caught drinking again. A little later during rehearsal, when Sugar’s flask falls to the floor, Sue responds angrily, but Jerry steps forward, and to Sugar’s surprise, claims the flask is his own. That night, Sugar sneaks to Jerry’s berth to thank him for his action, then abruptly jumps into the berth to avoid Sue. Overwhelmed by Sugar’s proximity, Jerry grows anxious and suggests that he needs a drink and within minutes an impromptu party ensues at Jerry’s berth. Joe awakens and is horrified, but gets drawn into the festivities when Sugar asks him to help break up an ice block in the ladies’ room.

There Sugar confides that she is with the all-girl band in order to escape a series of unhappy love affairs with tenor saxophone players and dreams of finding a sensitive millionaire who wears glasses. Upon arriving in Florida at the beachfront Ritz Seminole Hotel, “Daphne” catches the attention of wealthy, oft-married Osgood Fielding III. Once in their room, Jerry, infuriated at being flirted with and pinched by Osgood, demands they give up their disguises and find a male band, but Joe insists they must maintain their masquerade, as Spats will surely investigate male orchestras all over the country. Jerry reluctantly agrees and then accompanies Sugar to the beach. Unknown to Jerry, Joe has stolen Beinstock’s suitcase of clothes and eyeglasses and, dressing in them, goes to the beach where he stages an accidental meeting with Sugar. Joe implies that he is the heir to the Shell Oil company and, captivated by the apparently sensitive “Junior,” Sugar invites him to the band’s opening that night. Back in their room, Jerry receives a call from Osgood inviting Daphne to a candlelit dinner on board his yacht.

Joe accepts for Jerry, then tells his protesting friend that he must keep the date with Osgood on shore, as he, in the guise of Shell Oil, Junior, plans to dine with Sugar on Osgood’s yacht. That night during the band’s performance, Osgood sends Jerry an enormous bouquet, which Joe commandeers to give to Sugar with a card inviting her to dine with Junior. Afterward, Joe meets Sugar on the pier as an unhappy Jerry talks Osgood into dining at a local roadhouse. While Jerry and Osgood tango to the music of a Cuban band at the roadhouse, on board Osgood’s yacht Joe convinces Sugar that a romantic emotional shock in his youth has left him impotent and years of expensive medical treatment have failed to cure him. Appalled, Sugar begs Joe to allow her to help, but after numerous passionate kisses, Joe insists he is unmoved. Determined, Sugar pleads to keep trying and Joe agrees. At dawn, Joe climbs back in the window of the hotel room to find Jerry deliriously happy because Osgood has proposed.

Taken aback, Joe tells his friend it is impossible for him to marry another man, but Jerry explains his plan to reveal his identity after the marriage ceremony and, after an annulment, force Osgood to pay him alimony. Disturbed by Jerry’s high spirits, Joe urges him to remember that he is a boy, and Jerry sadly wonders what to do with Osgood’s engagement gift, an extravagant diamond bracelet. The next day, gangsters from all over the country, summoned by mob boss Little Bonaparte, meet at the hotel under the guise of attending an opera convention. Mulligan is also present and when Spats arrives, accuses him of the murder of Toothpick Charlie and his gang. Upon spotting Spats in the lobby, Joe and Jerry panic and realize they must flee. In their room, Jerry laments having to give up Osgood and Joe telephones Sugar to disclose that Junior’s family has ordered him to Venezuela immediately for an arranged marriage. Moved by Sugar’s despair, Joe places the diamond bracelet in a box of flowers and pushes it across the hall to her door as a farewell gift from Junior.

Joe and Jerry then escape out of their hotel window but are seen by Spats and his men on the floor below. When the pair dash away leaving their instruments behind, Spats finds bullet holes in Jerry’s bass and realizes the “broads” are the Chicago murder witnesses in disguise. Knowing they have been discovered, Joe and Jerry dress as a bellboy and a wheelchair-bound millionaire and head across the lobby filled with Spats’s men. Noticing that Jerry has inadvertently left on his high heels, the henchmen give chase and Joe and Jerry run into a convention hall and hide, unaware that the mob “convention” is scheduled to meet there. Moments later, Spats sits at the table under which Joe and Jerry are hiding, and in a prearranged plan, Bonaparte pretends to honor Spats by presenting him with a giant cake, out of which bursts an assassin who guns down Spats and his men. Terrified, Joe and Jerry bolt, but as Bonaparte orders them found, Mulligan and his men close in to make arrests.

Resuming their disguises as women, Joe and Jerry overhear that the remainder of Bonaparte’s men are watching all buses and trains out of town and Joe decides they should escape on Osgood’s yacht after Jerry elopes with him. When Jerry balks, Joe says their only option is certain death by Bonaparte’s men. While Jerry telephones Osgood to make arrangements, Joe hears Sugar and the band finishing a song and climbs onto the stage to tell her that no man is worth her heartbreak, then kisses her before hurrying away. Realizing that “Josephine” is “Junior,” Sugar follows the men down to the dock and the waiting Osgood. As they all board the speedboat, Joe removes his wig and confesses that he is a liar and a phony, but Sugar insists that she does not care and the couple embrace. Meanwhile, Osgood proudly tells Daphne that his mother is delighted about their upcoming wedding. Jerry nervously confesses that he cannot marry him, declaring that he is not a natural blonde, smokes, has lived in sin and cannot bear children, but Osgood remains cheerfully undaunted.

At last Jerry snatches off his wig and admits that he is a man, wherein Osgood happily assures him that, after all, “nobody’s perfect.” Production Company: Yachts and yachting Note: The Var review erroneously listed a running time of 105 minutes for the film. The title of the film refers to the contemporary description of interpreting jazz music “hot” (improvisational) as opposed to “sweet” or “straight” (as written). The plot for Some Like It Hot was taken from a 1951 German film, Fanfaren das Liebe , written by Robert Thoeren and M. Logan. The story, to which writer-director Billy Wilder had purchased the rights, featured two Depression-era musicians who are driven by poverty to pretend to be gypsies, Black men and finally women in order to find work with various bands. A Jul 1958 HR news item noted that longtime actor-comedian Joe E.

Brown was brought out of semi-retirement to play “Osgood Fielding III.” HR news items add the following actors to the cast: Jack Mather, Tiger Joe Marsh, Pat Cominsky, Fred Sherman, Billy Wayne, Ralph Volkie, Carl Sklover, John Logan, Gayle Gleason, Joyce Horne, Joan Kelly, Lisa Long, Dea Myles, Virginia Lee, Minta Durfee, H. Tommy Hart, Ted Christy, Joe Palma and George Lake, but their appearance in the final film has not been confirmed. In addition the songs performed in the film, portions of the following tunes were used: “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “By the Beautiful Sea,” “Randolph Street Rag,” “La Cumprasita” and “Park Avenue Fantasy” (also known as “Stairway to the Sky”). As noted in various contemporary sources, the sequences set in Florida were shot on location at the Hotel Del Coronado Resort near San Diego, California. According to information in the file on the film in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library, in correspondence dated 5 Mar 1959, the Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas F.

Little of the National Catholic Legion of Decency found Some Like It Hot to contain “screen material elements that are judged to be seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency. ... The subject matter of ‘transvestism’ naturally leads to complications; in this film there seemed to us clear inference of homosexuality and lesbianism. The dialogue was not only ‘double entendre’ but outright smut. The offense in costuming was obvious." MPAA head Geoffrey Shurlock responded in a letter dated 18 Mar 1959: "So far there is simply no adverse reaction at all; nothing but praise for it as a hilariously funny movie. I am not suggesting, of course, that there are not dangers connected with a story of this type.

But girls dressed as men, and occasionally men dressed as women for proper plot purposes, has been standard theatrical fare as far back as As You Like It and Twelfth Night ....We of course are not defending the two exaggerated costumes worn by the leading lady.” Information in the file indicates that, upon the film’s release, Kansas delayed distribution for two months when the state Board of Review refuses to approve the picture unless over one hundred feet of footage, mostly of the love scene between “Sugar Kane” and “Shell Oil, Junior,” was cut. The Memphis, TN Board of Censors rejected the film, then agreed to pass it if it was restricted to adults only. In a modern article by co-writer I. A. L. Diamond, he stated that he and Wilder spent a year developing the script. Wilder and Diamond decided to drop the first two plot devices from the Thoeren-Logan film and focus on the men dressing as women and joining an all-girl band. Initially, the Wilder-Diamond script was set in contemporary times because Wilder and Diamond felt they needed a situation more powerful than poverty to compel the characters to dress as women.

According to Diamond, he suggested that a period setting would make it easier for the audience to accept female impersonation and Wilder then came up with the idea to set the story during the jazz age and have their characters witness a gangland slaying as motivation for hiding out. The gangland slaying that figures prominently in Some Like It Hot was loosely based upon the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre that took place in Chicago on 14 Feb, 1929. The "hit" was linked to mob boss Al Capone and took place against his longtime rival, George "Bugs" Moran, over control of Chicago's bootlegging, gambling and prostitution rackets. The massacre was plotted by Capone's top henchman, Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, and featured four men masquerading as policemen making a bootlegging raid on seven of Moran's associates. Moran was not present at the slaying and Capone was in Florida. Neither Capone nor McGurn were ever charged with the murders. Diamond stated that Wilder offered Jack Lemmon the role of "Jerry," and Lemmon gave him a verbal agreement to appear in the film, despite being under contract to Columbia Pictures.

Tony Curtis was signed first, but United Artists pressured Wilder to cast a bigger box-office name than Lemmon for the second male lead. According to Diamond, at UA’s recommendation, Wilder approached Frank Sinatra, but Sinatra failed to make an appointment with the director. A modern biography on Wilder states that the director also had approached Anthony Perkins to co-star with Sinatra. According to a news item in a modern source, Danny Kaye was also considered for Lemmon's role. Mitzi Gaynor was considered for “Sugar,” until Marilyn Monroe wrote to Wilder, expressing the hope that they could work together again after their success with The Seven Year Itch (see above). The FF review noted that Monroe consented to appear in the film only after production executive Harold Mirisch offered her ten percent of the gross. Once Monroe was signed, Wilder was able to sign Lemmon. Some Like It Hot marked the first of seven films that Lemmon would make with Wilder between 1959--1981 including The Apartment (see above), The Fortune Cookie (1966, see AFI Catalog of Feature Films 1961-70 ) and The Front Page (1974).

Diamond credited Wilder with casting supporting actors Raft, Pat O’Brien and George E. Stone, all popularly associated with playing in gangster films in the 1930s and 1940s. In a modern interview with Wilder, he stated that he had hoped to cast Edward G. Robinson, but because of a long-standing disagreement between Robinson and Raft, Robinson refused. Edward G. Robinson, Jr., son of the actor, who famously portrayed several gangsters in 1930s films, appeared in the small role as the coin flipping henchman "Johnny Paradise," who pops out of the cake and kills “Spats” and his men. George Raft, who plays “Spats,” used the coin flipping gimmick in UA’s 1932 controversial gangster film, Scarface (see AFI Catalog of Feature Films: 1931-40 ). Diamond stated in his article that Curtis came up with the idea of Shell Oil, Junior mimicking actor Cary Grant's speech pattern.

Diamond’s article and numerous modern interviews with Wilder describe difficulties with Monroe during filming, including forty-seven takes of the line “Where’s that bourbon?” that was eventually shot with the actress’ back to the camera. One Wilder biography states that the director was not happy with Curtis’ falsetto voice as “Josephine” and had it re-dubbed in a recording studio. In his autobiography, Lemmon indicates that Harry Ray helped to design his makeup. Diamond described the first preview for Some Like It Hot at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palidsades, CA, where a conservative, middle-aged audience barely responded to the comedy. Two nights later, a second preview was held at the Village Theater in Westwood Village and the audience, primarily made up of university students, was enthusiastic. Although many modern sources indicate that the reviews upon the release of Some Like It Hot were mixed, most were positive. Var described the film as “probably the funniest picture of recent memory.

It’s a whacky, clever, farcical comedy that starts off like a firecracker and keeps on throwing off lively sparks till the very end.” HR wrote that the film was a “supersonic, breakneck, belly-laugh comedy” and MPH called it “one of the wildest, wooliest and most infectiously fun comedies of the year.” In the LAT review under the headline: “ Some Like It Hot Not as Hot as Expected,” the reviewer found the film “not the unalloyed delight it was cracked up to be,” and considered it “not at all sure what kind of comedy it is.” The reviewer expressed annoyance with Curtis’ mimicking Cary Grant and labeled the closing line “a startler.” The film has gone on to become one of the highest regarded comedies of all time and Brown’s closing line of "Nobody's perfect" is one of Hollywood's most iconic moments. A 1939 Paramount production of Ben Hecht's musical show Some Like It Hot is not related to the Wilder film (see AFI Catalog of Featire Films, 1931-40 ).

Some Like It Hot won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design (b&w) and received nominations for Best Actor (Lemmon), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography (b&w), Best Director and Best Screenplay. In 2001, AFI selected Some Like It Hot as the number one comedy film of all time. Some Like It Hot was ranked 22nd on AFI's 2007 100 Years…100 Movies--10th Anniversary Edition list of the greatest American films, moving down from the 14th position it held on AFI's 1997 list. In 2001 Curtis began touring with a revival of the stage musical Sugar! (which originally ran on Broadway from Apr 1972 to Jun 1973) which was renamed Some Like It Hot . In that production, Curtis assumed the role of Osgood. Bibliographic Sources: Isn’t It Wonderful? - The New Yorker Isn’t It Wonderful?

Tony Curtis sings and dances in “Some Like It Hot.” By Lillian Ross From downtown Las Vegas, it takes about twenty minutes, driving on flat, freshly paved, blistering-hot freeways, to reach Tony Curtis’s house. To get there, one drives south on Las Vegas Boulevard, escaping the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the Strip, where the persistent jangle of the casinos lingers in the air. Curtis lives in a practically treeless, odorless, sun-blazed suburb called Henderson, with hisdevoted thirty-two-year-old wife, the former Jill Ann VandenBerg, and seven small dogs, including Josephine, a Yorkie that, like the Josephine character Curtis played in Billy Wilder’s 1959 movie “Some Like It Hot,” is a male. The Curtises also have a couple of cats, including a fluffy white one named Marilyn. For the past several months, Curtis, who has played more than a hundred and twenty roles in a career that spans fifty years, has been working and rehearsing at home, preparing to go onstage for the first time since he started making movies. He has been cast in the Joe E.

Brown role of the old millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, in the forthcoming musical-theatre version of “Some Like It Hot.” It will be his singing and dancing début. Before starting on a twenty-eight-city tour, which will wind up in Portland, Oregon, in about a year, the show is scheduled to open at the new Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, in Houston, on June 4th, one day after Curtis’s seventy-seventh birthday. “I’m going to have a piece of the profits from the show,” Curtis said last month, with unconcealed delight. “I like the adventure of it—it means a lot to me.” He speaks in a distinctive, rich-throated New Yorkese that moviegoers know well, and he is a bit hard of hearing in one ear. “All those years in movies with gunshots and explosions!” he said. Deeply suntanned, he has a thick, auburn-colored head of hair and is somewhat stouter and fuller of face than he was in his youth; otherwise he exudes the same overeager, innocent, unguarded persona of the characters he played in many of his movies.

The Curtises’ house, a white stucco one-story Italian-Spanish ranch, stands on a half acre of precious, water-deprived land. Curtis shows the same undisguised affection for these digs that he shows for just about everything else in his life. He and Jill bought the house last year, had it modified to their specifications, and moved in last summer. All of the houses in Curtis’s colony look similar, arranged in a cozy huddle, but his seems to be the only one that has a front lawn, a four-by-four-foot patch on one side of the entry walk and a six-by-eight-foot patch on the other. The garage holds three convertibles, a canary-colored Porsche (Jill’s) and two Trans Ams (Tony’s). In the back of the house is a swimming pool, about twenty-five feet long and five feet deep, with a water-replacing vanishing edge. Also squeezed onto the half acre is a small house for the dogs, and an artist’s studio for Curtis that is filled with dozens of his paintings, including many in Matisse-like colors and a large brown one of Curtis’s hero, Muhammad Ali.

In addition to easels, paints, and brushes, and a steadily increasing number of paintings, Curtis regularly creates scores of three-dimensional shadow boxes that he calls “my little touches of memory.” Many of the boxes were previously host to cigars. He fills them with whatever odds and ends he can lay his hands on, such as dolls’ heads or other toys discarded by his children when they were small. (He had six children, two each from three of his four previous wives, and he now has six grandchildren, whom he unabashedly adores.) Jill, an accomplished horsewoman, grew up in San Diego. She is almost six feet tall and has straight, baby-blond hair, which she wears cut extremely short. She likes to collect things, too. “This darling girl’s great love is Marilyn Monroe,” Curtis said proudly. “I have half a dozen photos of Marilyn Monroe that are hard to find,” Jill said modestly. “I have some from the nineteen-sixties, taken four or five weeks before she died. I found and bought them on eBay. Also on eBay I bought, for about twelve hundred dollars, a photograph of Jean Harlow with her autograph.

It reads, ‘Sincerely, Jean Harlow.’ On the frame is a plaque saying ‘The Blonde Bombshell. 1911-1937.’ “ “That Marilyn!” Curtis said, hugging his wife. “She was like a naughty seven-year-old. She told Jack Lemmon, when we were making ‘Some Like It Hot,’ ‘I love working with you, but not with Tony.’ Then she told me, ‘I love working with you, but not with Jack.’ Then she told both of us she thought Billy had lost his touch. He called her the mean seven-year-old.” Curtis gave a little smile. “I had a brief, sweet affair with Marilyn. When I first knew her, I was twenty-three. She was a year younger. We were two children wanting to be famous. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were together for seven months. It was sweet and innocent, you know? We both had careers. Those early days were a very special time for me. I had a Buick convertible with Dynaflow. I drove with the top down. Embedded in my head is one day when I picked her up at the studio and drove her into town.

I would look in the rearview mirror, which in those days was concave. It was one of those five-minute miracles. We looked at each other in the mirror as we drove, and we both knew we were going to be”—he paused briefly—”successful.” When Curtis appraises his career as an actor, he becomes suddenly serious. Of all his movies—including “Houdini,” “Trapeze,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Spartacus,” “The Defiant Ones”—his favorite was “The Boston Strangler,” which came out in 1968. “Playing that murderer, Albert DeSalvo, was the greatest challenge, and so satisfying,” he told me. Even today, he enjoys telephoning friends and greeting them by saying, “This is Albert DeSalvo.” “I love it here in Vegas,” Curtis went on. “I’m not bumming L.A. But L.A. is not for me. On a single movie set, you would have eighty workers. Some people would come to work with built-up anger and envy. And there’s nothing I could do about it. A lot of them verbalized their anger. They didn’t hit me, but I always felt afraid.

I could never show my fear. They’d have killed me if I showed it.” Curtis said he used to hang out with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., and he learned about singing from them. “But I was always afraid to open my mouth,” he said. “All these people I listened to over the years impregnated me. What I learned from them stayed with me. I was afraid to dance, too. I loved the companionship of women, but in the old days I was always afraid. “Life in L.A. was insular,” Curtis continued. “I went to a psychiatrist out there for a couple of years, only because I needed someone to talk to. I enjoyed it. But my life is much bigger now. I’m thrilled to have a girl like Jill. She never gets impatient with me. She helps me. In learning my part for the show, she runs lines with me as Daphne, the one Osgood falls for. We came to Vegas on a vacation, and we never left. We got married here. I love Vegas. It’s fun. It has uncomplicated money, and I like that. It allows you to be anyone you want to be.

Here I don’t feel afraid.” Last month, Curtis started working on the three songs and three dance numbers that he will do in the new production of “Some Like It Hot,” which essentially tells the same story as the film—two musicians in 1929 disguised as women on the run from murderous Chicago gangsters. The stage version has a new book, written by Peter Stone; some old songs and some never-before-performed songs by the late Jule Styne, with lyrics by Bob Merrill; new dance music, composed for the show by Mark Hummel; and original choreography by the show’s director, Dan Siretta. “I want to bring everything I learned from the movies to this show, everything,” Curtis said one morning in his living room, shortly before coming to New York for a month of rehearsals. “I’ve retained everything that I learned from my mentors, and now I feel free to use what they taught me. A lot of these guys treated me like a kid, and I liked that. But, in my own way, I was always building Tony Curtis.

I feel so good now, living in Vegas and learning what I’ve got to do in the show.” The unrelenting sun outside the tall picture windows subtly threatened the room, which was cool and crammed with mementos: a couple of enormous silver champagne buckets, engraved with the words “Most Popular Star—Modern Screen Awards”; a solid-gold Photoplay-magazine medallion, three inches in diameter, “Presented on behalf of the American moviegoing public to Tony Curtis—most popular actor 1958”; a painting of an orange-and-yellow lady’s boot, by Andy Warhol, entitled “The Some Like It Hot Shoe”; an elaborately tooled leather saddle, given to him by a cowboy friend; many family albums filled with photographs of attractive ex-wives, including his first, the “Psycho” star Janet Leigh (“A real class act, beautiful and brilliant,” Curtis says of her), and of handsome children, including the actress and children’s-book author Jamie Lee Curtis. Curtis, wearing white tennis shorts, a white tank top, and brown Birkenstocks, got ready for his regular, hour-long morning session with his vocal coach.

He picked up some song sheets from a stack on top of an upright piano. Colorful Curtis paintings stood against the walls and furniture or lay on the floor, because, Curtis explained, he doesn’t believe in making holes in the walls to hang them. “I’m going to play my millionaire different from Joe E. Brown’s in the movie,” he said. “I don’t want people to be thinking of Joe E. Brown when they see me. “I had many mentors who prepared me for this,” he went on. “My mentors were nice to me. Larry Olivier was very kind and very generous. He helped me be what I had to be in ‘Spartacus’; there I was, yours truly, scrubbing him down and massaging his back in the bath scene, where he’s telling me, ‘I love both oysters and snails.’ Wasn’t that wonderful?’’ He burst into an appreciative guffaw and then said, “It was Olivier who told me the most important thing I had to know for acting.

He said, ‘Clothes make the man, dear boy’ “—Curtis did an impressive Olivier accent—” ‘Just put on the clothes, Tony, and look at yourself; you’ll know what to do,’ he would say. I’ve been very careful with my clothes ever since. I’ve got to choose what I’ll wear in the show, when I get to New York. For here, I’ve got this, my millionaire’s yachting cap.” With a big grin, he clapped the cap on his head. “Billy Wilder was one of my mentors,” Curtis said. “He was first-rate. But I was never completely at ease with him. Something about him made me nervous. I was always afraid of him. He was quirky. He was mean. As a little kid, growing up in the poor neighborhoods in New York, I learned you’ve got to be careful of everybody. That’s what growing up in New York teaches you.” Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz, in the Bronx in 1925, the son of a Hungarian tailor. “We were very poor, but, oh, boy, was my dad a snappy dresser!” Curtis said.

“And he had a tattoo on his shoulder that showed an eagle, with a ribbon in its claws, and on it the saying ‘Knowledge Is Power.’ “ As a child, Curtis spoke Hungarian at home, and he didn’t learn English until he was almost five, when he went to school. He still loves to speak Hungarian. A few weeks ago, when the Hungarian director George Sidney lay dying, Mrs. Sidney put Curtis on the phone with him. “I talked to him in Hungarian, telling him how much I loved him,” Curtis said. Curtis and his parents and his two brothers lived in back of the tailor’s shop. “We kept moving, from one poor neighborhood to another,” Curtis said. “When I started school, when I went out in the streets, the tough guys would chase me and beat me up. So I learned how to run, to run fast. I learned you’ve got to be careful of people. “So I was afraid of Billy Wilder. I didn’t want him popping me all the time. I was wild. I was like that. He wanted to know all about the girls. He wanted to know about the sex. Maybe he was a little jealous of me.

I told him things he wanted to know, but still I was afraid. “At the same time, I learned from him,” Curtis said. “He taught me how to do the quick response. If you overlap each other’s dialogue, it moves the action along faster. Don’t wait, talk right away. In the movie, I ask Jack Lemmon, ‘Why would a guy want to marry a guy?’ ‘Security!’ Jack replies. Fast. Like that. Don’t wait to get a laugh. The quick response. Billy Wilder loved it. “ Curtis went on, turning serious. “It helped me understand something terrible Billy did to me. I lost one of my boys, Nicholas, to drugs. He was twenty-three. A week or so later, I went to Spago. I saw Billy Wilder, and I went over to his table and knelt down next to where he was sitting. I said quietly to him, ‘My son Nicholas died of an overdose of heroin.’ His reply was fast. ‘He learned it from you,’ he said. I was deeply hurt. But I made myself forgive him. I understood it was something he couldn’t help. He was so steeped in the quick response.

“Burt Lancaster was a mentor to me, too. He treated me like a professional, in ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ and ‘Trapeze,’ “ Curtis said. “Burt Lancaster treated me real nice. He acted professionally with me, so he got me to do it with him. I was never afraid of him. It was Cary Grant who taught me, when we made ‘Operation Petticoat’—’It’s got to be artless, Tony, artless.’ “ He did a great Cary Grant imitation and laughed. “Cary Grant and I got to be good friends,” he said. “He saw in me something that appealed to him. I told him how the whole reason I quit school and went into the Navy when I was a teen-ager was because of him.” As a child living in the Bronx, Curtis saw “Destination Tokyo,” with Grant as the submarine captain, standing in the tower, looking through the periscope. Curtis became a signalman on a submarine tender, and in 1945 he watched the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. After the war, he enrolled at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, at the New School, with the help of the G.I.

Bill. His classmates included Walter Matthau and Bea Arthur, but Curtis was the first of them to go to Hollywood. “All I wanted then was to be a movie star. I told all that to Cary Grant, and he wasn’t afraid to show his feelings,” Curtis said. “He’d say, ‘Tony, Tony, Tony.’ “ (Curtis did another impressive imitation.) “Like that.” He went on,”When Cary Grant said, ‘Tony, I’ll never grow old on the screen,’ I said, ‘I won’t, either.’ And I won’t. Going on the stage is different. You’re alive, right there, in front of everybody.” He paused. “I never took it for granted. I never take anything for granted. Whatever I’ve done, whatever I do now, I consider a privilege. When I made ‘The Defiant Ones,’ with Sidney Poitier, they wanted to bill me above the title and to bill him below. Up to that point, no black actor had ever been billed above the title. I said we were both the same. I said they should put our names up there together. Equal billing.

And that’s what they did.” Curtis, standing in his living room holding sheet music, grinned as Jill entered. She was barefoot and wore a blue floral-patterned sarong. She plumped down, cross-legged, on the floor, cuddling a couple of dogs. Marilyn, the cat, wandered in and sat down beside her. The vocal coach arrived—a cheerful fellow named Clito Piermarini, who wore wire-rimmed spectacles, a small gray goatee, and a tiny gold piano on his left earlobe. Three nights a week, he sings at the Venetian hotel. “I’m in an old Venetian costume,” he said. “I stroll around in the hotel’s St. Mark’s Square, and around the Canal, playing the accordion, singing requests like ‘O Sole Mio’ and Musetta’s waltz from Puccini’s ‘La Bohème.’ “ “Pier, you know I don’t just want to be in this show because I’m a celebrity,” Curtis said, as the teacher sat down at the upright. “I’ve got to sing.

I’m so happy to sing!” Curtis spread his arms wide, and in an unrestrained baritone sang a couple of lines from one of his songs: “I fall in love too easily, I fall in love too fast. . . .” Piermarini, nodding encouragement, pounded out accompanying chords on the piano. Curtis gave a quick laugh and sang on: “I fall in love too terribly hard, for love to ever last. . . .” A little mutt entered and began barking shrilly. “Shut up! I’m singing!” Curtis yelled. Jill grabbed the barker and quieted him. “This one is Schwartz, after Tony’s real name,” she said. Curtis grinned. “Sinatra always called me Bernie,” he said, and laughed. “Sinatra was an intriguing man. He was very set in his thinking. Very angry. Where it came from I’m not sure. But he treated me nice. Someone asked him, ‘Who’s your favorite actor?’ Frank said, ‘Tony Curtis. Because he made it against all odds.

He broke the fucking arts.’ “ Curtis looked through his script and said that, as the millionaire Osgood Fielding III, he would be on the hotel veranda with Sugar (the character played by Marilyn Monroe in the film). “Then I’ll be singing ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily.’ But I’ve got to bring my own style to it, bring my own signature, the way the great singers do,” Curtis said. “Am I getting it right?” he asked the coach. “I fall in love too easily,” he sang again, in a full, rich voice. “Right! Fabulous!” Piermarini called out, in accents reminiscent of Robert De Niro. “You’ve got a great voice, no question.” Curtis nodded. “Paul McCartney told me, ‘Don’t worry; just tell the story.’ He told me, ‘God likes you when you smile; God loves you when you sing.’ “I want to leave part of me open so the director can give me his feeling,” Curtis said. “I’ve come a long way, getting ready for this show. I lost weight. Fifteen pounds. I’m now down to a hundred and eighty. I exercise by doing what I like to do. I swim twice a day.

Jillie and I go out disco dancing at least three nights a week. The disco Light, at the Bellagio, is our home away from home.” Curtis said that he wanted to work on “The November Song.” “That’s when Osgood sees Jerry dressed as Daphne and starts making passes at her. I want to make him different from Joe E. Brown’s Osgood. Brown was an extraordinary comedian. But I want to make my Osgood frivolous, very extravagant. Billy Wilder wanted a more graphic millionaire, with a lot of old millionaires in rocking chairs, not good for anything anymore. I want my Osgood to be freer, looser, more like a little kid playing.” He made silly gestures with his hands, like a little kid. “Joe E. Brown himself was very penurious, very tight,” Curtis went on. “Jack Lemmon and I used to joke about the way he never went for the tab. He was stingy with everything. He wouldn’t ever ad-lib. Let’s go, Pier.

Let’s work on ‘The November Song.’ “ Curtis sang: You can call it madness if you’re so inclined But though we’re somewhat older we are still not blind And if we still go frantic for a sweet behind Even naughty old men need love. “Great job,” Piermarini said. “One thing, about the timing. Go slow. Talk it in the beginning. Ad-lib it.” Curtis grinned and did the song again. “And this is where I go into a dance routine with the other millionaires,” he said. He did a little shuffle and sighed. “That’s gonna be nice, eh?” he said. “I want to be like the bow of a ship, making my own way, cutting the stream.” For dinner, Curtis and Jill often head for the Bellagio hotel, which has an elegant restaurant called Picasso, where eleven original Picassos, along with more than eighty security cameras, look down from the walls at the diners. One evening last month, Curtis and Jill set out for Picasso. He was wearing a black Armani suit and a white satin shirt.

Jill had on a pair of Manolo Blahniks with four-inch heels and a very short, strapless, silk print dress that had been made to order to highlight her ample figure. They took a slow, regal stroll to the restaurant, where they got a splendid royal greeting. “It’s such a privilege to eat here,” Curtis said. After dinner, they ambled through the hotel’s huge lobby. Every now and then, Curtis was stopped for an autograph request. “People in their twenties recognize him,” Jill said serenely, while Curtis graciously signed for a group of giggling young tourists wearing shorts. As the Curtises continued strolling toward the Bellagio’s disco, a gray-haired gentleman with a heavy North London accent ran after them and said, breathlessly, “I just wanted to tell you that my friends and I all copied your hair. We were mad about your hair!” “Yeah!” Curtis said, with an all-out laugh. “Full in the back, duck’s ass, and in the front, the high pompadour. It was right after World War II. Everybody else was into crewcuts.

But we wanted to make a statement.” At one point, Curtis paused in front of a bank of elevators. A very stout, handicapped young man in a wheelchair sped out and halted quickly in front of Curtis, who immediately put out his hand and offered it to the young man, who smiled hesitantly and then shook hands. “Good to see you, sir!” Curtis said exuberantly. Without being asked, he reached into his pocket, took out a scrap of paper, and scribbled a greeting and his signature on it. The young man, who had trou- ble speaking, managed to say thank you. “I lock eyes with everybody,” Curtis said later. “I like being seen.” Before he came to New York last month to rehearse with the cast, Curtis would work on his dancing three afternoons a week with Scott Burrell, a good-natured tap dancer with thinning hair who performs in many of the Las Vegas shows. He had been hired to dance in the chorus of “Some Like It Hot,” and he was teaching Curtis to tap-dance. Curtis, wearing his white shorts, put on white socks and a scuffed pair of old black tap shoes.

They worked in a studio, a few miles from Curtis’s house, outfitted with barres and mirrored walls. They practiced, accompanied by a recording of dance music that included songs by Janet Jackson and Harry Connick, Jr. “Let’s go with the basics,” Burrell said. “The way you did it the other day. Here we go. Step, shuffle, ball, change.” Curtis imitated him. “Good, good,” Burrell said. “I grew up with Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, and that’s what I love. That’s what the show is going to have. Wonderful, choreographed, traditional tap. There you go, Tony!” Curtis did some routines with Burrell, looking down at his feet as, somewhat hesitantly, he tapped out waltz clogs. “We’ll be doing this with the millionaires, right, Scott?” he said, rather winded, after going the length of the studio and back doing waltz clogs. “Very good,” Burrell said. “With the older men, there’ll be some soft shoe. Step and touch, backslide front, hold.” He illustrated. Curtis imitated him. “Good,” Burrell said.

“You’re developing body memory.” After an hour of drills, Curtis did shuffle, shuffle, slap, slap. He did step and touch, backslide front, and hold. Dancing, he looked less hesitant, albeit a mite stiff. He had some trouble not looking down at his feet. At the end of the session, Burrell told Curtis that he was doing great, and promised that by the time they got to the New York rehearsals he would have it all down pat. Curtis looked pleased. In what his voice teacher called his “nice, deep baritone,” he sang out: We cannot hope for youth or for a crown of curls But naughty old men need naughty young girls! He laughed and went off, he said, to buy seven old-fashioned steamer trunks—one of which he was going to fill with his easel, paints, brushes, and a set of tools for working on his boxes—to pack and take to New York. He said he was also going to buy a new pair of black tap shoes. Meanwhile, in Manhattan the show’s producers, Jeffrey Spolan and Diane Masters, were impatiently await- ing the arrival of Tony Curtis.

They live and work together in a twenty-second-floor apartment in a new Hell’s Kitchen building along the West Side Highway. They had never produced a show of any kind before this one. Their resemblance to the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland template of 1939 is barely discernible, but the spirit of it flickers. Spolan and Masters are both in their fifties. He is tall, with a boyish face; she is short, with a hoarse, authoritative voice. Masters was for many years a press agent for Off Broadway shows. Spolan has been an actor, promoter, producer, manager, investor, backer, and holder of odd jobs in the entertainment business all across the country. Each often steps on the other’s lines but tries, diplomatically, to back off. “We dated twenty-five years ago, and it didn’t take,” Spolan told me the other day in their apartment. “We dated eighteen years ago, and it didn’t take. Three years ago, we started dating again. This time, it took. It’s because this time we’re working together on ‘Some Like It Hot.’ “ “It holds us together,” Masters said.

The third occupant of the apartment is a white West Highland white terrier called Nicki, named after Masters’s father. “The husbands came and went, but the dog stayed,” Masters said. “It took about two years to get to where we are now, working some days around the clock,” Spolan said. “I’ve always been a creative person,” Masters added. “It started with her,” Spolan said. “It was always her idea to get Tony Curtis for the Joe E. Brown part.” “Jeffrey and I are on the same wavelength,” Masters said. “Every night, we say to each other—” Spolan paused and indicated to Masters that he was throwing her a cue. “It’s just you and me, kid,” they said together. Two years ago, they learned that the rights to the 1972 David Merrick-produced musical “Sugar,” which was based on “Some Like It Hot,” were available. They applied for the rights to the script and for the use of the title “Some Like It Hot.” They secured the coöperation of Peter Stone, who revised the “Sugar” script.

They enlisted Dan Siretta as director and choreog- rapher and got help from the widows of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill in finding new songs that might be used in the show. They started thinking about casting. “Diane said ‘Tony Curtis’ right away,” Spolan said, pointing to his partner. “But I said, ‘He’ll never do it; why would he want to do it?’ “ Masters said. “Then we went to Atlantic City to see Debbie Reynolds do her one-woman stage show.” “This is the best part of the story,” Spolan said. “It was my birthday—July, 2000. He bought me a classy black suit in Atlantic City,” Masters said. “We told Debbie Reynolds we were getting ready to do a workshop of the show. I told her that I wanted Tony Curtis for the millionaire. Debbie Reynolds said, ‘Call him. What else has he got to do—paint? Tell him to get off his ass!’ “ “Back in New York, we called his lawyer,” Spolan said. Masters said, “Forty-eight hours later, his lawyer called.

Tony’s answer: ‘Absolutely.’ He signed up for two years, with an option to do a third. Now he sings to me over the phone. He sings ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ his favorite.” “Revivals are what makes the bucks these days,” Spolan said. “Everybody is afraid of new stuff,” Masters said. “He’s going to play Tony when he plays Osgood,” Spolan said. “We want Tony to put Tony in Osgood.” “People love Tony, and he loves them back,” Masters said. “That’s all we want from Tony.” A couple of weeks later, Curtis and Jill were ensconced in the New York Palace Hotel, with the seven steamer trunks and two of their dogs. He had had his hair radically barbered and dyed white, for his part, and he had met with the director/choreographer, the music director, and other key people he would be working with. “Everybody is so nice to me,” he said. “The enjoyment of the experience is giving me a lot of energy. I like the adventure of it.” Rehearsals were due to start in a few days, at a studio in Chelsea, with the principal actors.

“It’s a lot of pressure, but the people from the show do everything for me,” Curtis said. “And they’re happy and smiling, without any anger. A cap came loose on one of my teeth. They immediately found a dentist for me who fixed it. I had a complete physical exam. It came out perfect. There’s chaos. But I had a few minutes to work on a song with the music director. So now he can give me his feeling for how I should do the songs. They rush me from one thing to another! Thirty people! It’s all gonna come together in two weeks to make a musical!” The day after Curtis’s arrival in New York, he made a personal appearance at the Film Forum, a West Village revival movie house that was showing a double feature of “Sweet Smell of Success” and “Some Like It Hot.” The Curtises got all dolled up, he in the black Armani and white satin shirt and she in a strapless black gown and high-heeled slippers. The sold-out crowd was made up of scruffy cinephiles. Nevertheless, a frantic, Cannes-like atmosphere pervaded the unglamorous venue. Curtis even had his own unofficial P.R.

adviser in attendance—Gary Hill, a young fast-talker with hair reaching to his shoulders who had named his business Falco Ink, in homage to Curtis’s press-agent character in “Sweet Smell of Success.” Photographers, camera lights, and tape-recorder-armed gossip reporters surfaced and buzzed around the Curtises. Struggling, they made their way into the dark theatre. After the closing credits of “Sweet Smell of Success” rolled, a young man in a business suit announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Curtis!” Gasps and a long, sincere ovation from the audience. Curtis moved to the front of the theatre. “I used to go to school around the corner down here on the Lower East Side,” he told the crowd. “I used to be beaten up by the gangs here. I escaped. All I wanted was to be a movie star. What a privilege it was to be in the movie you just saw. There’s a bit of me in Sidney Falco. He was just a guy trying to make it. I don’t think Sidney Falco should die at the end of this movie. He should get on the bus and go back to the Bronx, cleansed.

So here I am now, the son of a poor Hungarian tailor. Isn’t it wonderful?” The audience applauded. A few days later, at the first full-cast rehearsal of “Some Like It Hot,” Curtis got to work with Dan Siretta. Siretta started in musicals in 1959, when he danced in the chorus of “Fiorello!” For the rehearsal, he wore a black sports shirt under a larger black button-down shirt, black pants, and tan-colored tap shoes. After watching from the sidelines as Siretta rehearsed some numbers without him, Curtis ran through what would be the finale with the full company. During the tap dancing, he looked down at his feet occasionally, but then, when Siretta placed him, arms linked and centered in a line with two pretty girls in the chorus, he tapped and sang unself-consciously: Our deepest desire’s To sing in a choir But we’re on the spot Some like it hot! . . . Everybody likes it Some like it hot! Curtis tapped and kicked, his brow damp and his breath quick; but, holding on to the arms of the girls, he looked like he was having a good time.

“He’s getting there,” Siretta said to Scott Burrell, Curtis’s dance coach. “He just needs to get a little more secure.” Next, Curtis watched as Siretta rehearsed William Ryall, a tall, experienced dancer, who is to play Spats, the gangster (the George Raft part in the film). “We really follow the story just as it is in the movie,” Siretta said. “I’ve wanted to do this show for ten years. The Wilder-Diamond script is my bible.” Curtis watched Spats lead his gangsters in a menacing tap dance as they set out to find Jerry and Joe, the two musicians, dead or alive. “Spats kills people with his feet,” Siretta said. “He shoots people with his feet.” He did some heavy rat-a-tat-tat taps to illustrate. Curtis, from the side, looked delighted. “Aren’t these people wonderful?” he said. “The first time out there, you did it all just perfect,” Burrell said to Curtis, looking with approval at his new black tap shoes. “I feel like a proud dad.” Siretta joined them. “You get it,” he told Curtis.

“All you need is a few repetitions. When you sing ‘The November Song,’ we’ll have all the other millionaires moving around in rocking chairs on wheels.” Curtis slapped his knee and spontaneously sang out: I’ve had me moments I’ve tasted some life Ev’ry Christmastime a diff’rent wife One was a gypsy and on the Q.T. One was a partridge In a pear tree. A few afternoons later, Masters and Spolan showed up at a rehearsal. Siretta looked surprised to see them; producers don’t generally sit in on rehearsals. Nevertheless, he rehearsed a couple of dance numbers that included Curtis, who tap-danced without once looking down at his feet. He wound up kicking and laughing, showing no signs of being out of breath. At the end, everybody applauded. “Thanks, guys,” Curtis said. “See?” Masters said to Spolan. “See, I was right!” “You were right,” Spolan said. “You were right.” With about a week of rehearsals left, Siretta ran through “The November Song” with Curtis. Jill held up cue cards for her husband, marked with bits of lyrics.

He talked part of the song and ad-libbed, obviously enjoying himself. When he finished, he looked questioningly at Lynn Crigler, the music director. “You’ve got perfect pitch,” Crigler said. “You don’t go flat. You sing it as though you wrote it.” “You understand it,” Siretta said. “Maurice Chevalier could understand it and do it. For me, Jimmy Durante did it the best when he sang ‘As Time Goes By.’ Now you’re doing it.” “This is exciting. You’re making it artless for me,” Curtis said. He held up his hands, intertwined his fingers, and shook his head. With a mischievous smile, he went over to Siretta and kissed him on the mouth. “I’m beginning to think I can do this,” Curtis said. ♦ Lillian Ross joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and worked with Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor.

Question: Which actor sped off with Jack Lemmon in a speedboat at the end of the film 'Some Like It Hot'?
Answer: JOE E BROWN